


In Thrall

by st_aurafina



Category: KEATS John - Works
Genre: F/F, F/M, Genderqueer Character, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-01
Updated: 2012-06-01
Packaged: 2017-11-06 12:34:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/418983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/st_aurafina/pseuds/st_aurafina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For mortal or fairy the thread of a story, once snagged, is with you forever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Thrall

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Junetide 2011, for the prompt _Fantasy based on Keats's "La Belle Dame Sans Merci", wherein the knight gets a second chance with the lady._
> 
> Thank you to my betas

"He thinks me pitiless, this pale knight with his starving horse." The Queen speaks to a courtier. She has little expectation that he will answer: she selects her court for their beauty and not their eloquence. "He wanders through withered fields, yearning, and he thinks me a monster, that I would give him but one sip of paradise then cast him aside." She laughs, a seed-dry rattle, and the knight's head turns blindly towards them. "To live in paradise takes steel he does not have. He should thank me for my kindness and sink into a mundane life. I have pity enough for that." 

The courtier raises his eyebrows, articulate enough that she can read the question within: Why should she care, Queen that she is? 

He is right. There are other, finer follies in the world than this one man. Far to the north, fire noses hard at a thick crust of ice, ready to roar forth into the sky. She will gather her court, and they will ride white-tipped waves through the black and ice-bound ocean far from here. In the eruption that will soon follow, they will tilt at clouds of embers and dance wreathed in steam. 

There is something tugging at her heart as she rides. She reins in the sleek green mount and glances behind her. On the stubbled field, strands of red and gold lie snagged in the hinge of the pale knight's gauntlet and he stares at the gleaming threads in wonder. 

\---

It is difficult to know how and when, in the weave of the world, a thread thought lost will re-emerge. Human souls are fragile things that snap and fray, and are rarely seen again. Still, a robin's egg, by chance, may survive a gale. The Queen is summoned by sounds of copper, lead and glass, to an arid place on a cool winter's night. 

The knight's ashes are long ploughed back into the soil, yet here his spirit stands, in a dress pulled close by whalebone and steel. Her buttoned boots tread over the dry and thirsty earth with care. She stands her telescope on a frame of steel and leather, in a place painstakingly cleared of the salt-loving trees. 

Her name is Caroline, and if she must live in this wasteland at the bottom of the globe, she will damn well write her name among the stars. And so, with the hoarded scraps of time left to a grazier's wife, she scours the night sky, learning the bodies that hang there and hoping to name one herself. 

Her ambition pulls like a magnet, drawing the Queen closer. Somehow, Caroline has caught a snatch of the music of the universe, the dance of worlds and pulse of stars. The Queen wonders briefly what this will do to a mortal mind. Distracted, her image flares across the lens of the telescope, a glimmer of light in the sky where before there was nothing.

The two regard each other solemnly. There are mysteries here that will consume you, the Queen says, I have tried to stay you from this path before. She does not think that Caroline will hear or understand. This soul, as she knew it, has more pride than sense. It is a surprise, then, that Caroline steps away from the lens, folds the legs of the steel tripod. She may not understand the danger that she has sensed, but she knows that she need not face it down tonight. She is turning for the farmstead, to the solid reality of her husband and an ironwood bed. 

The Queen trails through the woman's dreams, and finds only peaceful satisfaction. In the dream, Caroline strides across the low, green hills of her birthplace, and reaches to pluck the stars like fruit from the skies. 

"You cannot hope to reach the highest," says the Queen. It is true. That privilege is reserved for the Queen, and those she admits to her court. 

"If not me, then my daughter, or hers, or hers." Caroline knows and trusts that the wonders of the universe are constant. Though she may not see them all, others will stand upon her work to reach higher.

The persistence of ambition beyond one's lifespan is frightening to one who is immortal. Confused, the Queen flees the dream. In her wake, comets rain down upon Caroline. She stretches out her hands to gather them in, and she laughs. 

\---

In a place of mud and sulphur and misery, the soul is crying for his mother. The sound is thin and reedy, barely audible beneath the rumble of the guns. Still, it reaches out, all the way to distant deserts, where the locusts are rising for the summer grain. Somehow, it reaches the Queen's ear, over the thrum of wings and the moan of the swarm. The joust has just begun and she is yet to give out her favours, but she leaves, ribands streaming from her hands. She drives her six-legged mount north and west, to a mire of blood and bodies. 

He is young this time, barely a man, despite the brass and buckles on his uniform. The gas has done its work, and he is coughing out the last few breaths left to him. 

The Queen steps from her mount, and the mud shrinks away from her feet until she stands pristine on packed earth before the dying soldier. "What would she do for you, this mother? I will give you comfort in her absence." It seems right to offer. They have shared much, this soul and her. 

The boy can't speak, but the image in his mind is strong. Like a lens, the Queen brings clarity to the vision. Through her, it plays out over the low hanging clouds: a mother cradles her son in her lap, stroking his hair.

As the image grows, the guns fall silent and soldiers fall back on their heels to gawp at the sky. In the quiet, the boy passes softly. The soul is free again. The court gathers to their Queen like smoke, and the sound of their ride is a glorious rustle of wings. 

\---

The Queen seeks out that soul now and then, but the anguish of war has pushed it deep. When it finally returns, the Queen is dancing a pavane in the afternoon sky. The moon slides in front of the sun to make a crown for her head. Blazing through the darkness, glorious enough to blind, the Queen feels the soul shiver awake. 

It is a place as dark as the battlefield, where coloured beams of light slice into the gloom. Above, mirrors catch and scatter the colours over the heaving mass of dancers. From the questing, curious thoughts of the soul, and the newness of self, the Queen expects a newborn. Instead, she finds a woman. Ungainly and over-tall, she may as well be an infant. It shows in the awkward way she moves her feet and hands, trying to find the rhythm of the syncopated dance. She has changed the way she sees herself, but her body will not bend so easily to her will. 

The body is poorly made, thinks the Queen, or at least a poor fit for this soul that longs for delicacy and daintiness. She curls her lip at the thought that femininity must also mean frailty, and that night, she sends the woman a dream. The two of them hunt, with bows slung over their shoulders, on shaggy dun ponies that run for hours. 

"Fie for delicacy," says the Queen. She shows the woman how to kiss the bow string, how her shoulders can pull like oxen, how she can send an arrow hissing into the heart of the short-faced bear. They ride, and kill, and dress the beast themselves. By sunfall, the woman's arms and legs are heavy, but she is filled with satisfaction and a well-earned hunger. They throw down hides, and lounge in front of the fire, while the meat chars and spits. 

"It is what you make of it," says the Queen. She slices meat, passes it to the woman on the tip of her knife. "I would show you more, if you wish it." This one has the strength to resist the dangers of the court. She will not be easily consumed by it. 

In the dream, the woman watches her lazily while she considers the offer, licking her fingers clean. The fire has died, and the Queen's corona is curling outwards again, brilliant and dangerous. "I know you," the woman says, suddenly. "Have we hunted before?" 

Last time we hunted, you were the prey. The Queen doesn't answer, but the woman's senses are keen in the darkness and she stands to leave. The Queen could order her to stay, or make her yearn to join her court, but it does not sit well with her to do this. Not on a night when they have hunted and shared meat and blankets. 

The woman reaches inside her tunic, snatches at a string of beads and flings it at the place where she had sat. The Queen's eyes narrow; this is not part of the dream world she has constructed. The beads are amber, red and gold swirled imperfectly in lopsided spheres. 

"I am not your lump of clay," she says. "I will shape myself." 

The moon moves away from the sun, and the Queen's crown melts into mist. 

\---

The world turns and turns again, and there is no sound from the soul, no snag at the Queen's heart. Wars boil and spread and retreat over the globe. Fire bursts from the core, earth rises and smokes on the ocean, and still there is no call. 

Then, silent and sudden, like a dandelion clock releasing seed, the mortals fly from their small blue globe. They land here and there, cast about on winds they barely understand. Where they settle, they build new worlds, propagate and thrive, intent and irrelevant as ants. 

It is a fascinating diversion. The Queen watches children play on shores of crystal, and lovers tussle under a black glass dome. Her court follows her from world to world, and they never question the speed at which they must seek out new wonders. She has chosen them for their obedience, after all. 

It comes softly at first, a joy that is quiet and so still that she barely notices it, a deliberate call sung into the darkness. It creeps and colours her vision, tints everything with glorious sunset, until the richness of it is unbearable.

She summons the court. At her side, they deftly weave acceleration and gravity until the particle fields bend around them, and they are at the source of the song. 

The world is small and distant , softly green in the darkness, oceans alive with tiny lights. The mortals have built hanging platforms to span the emerald seas. There they farm, coaxing fruit and air from thin and precious soil brought with them on their colony ships. The soul is there, the Queen is sure of it. She hovers, seeking the place, then cuts through the atmosphere, flaming green and orange as she makes planetfall. 

The soul is a woman, halfway through life, and she sits in a grove of peach trees. Her home is three rooms on a gently swaying platform, and all these trees are hers. 

At the end of a day spent tending her orchard, the woman sits cross-legged at the edge of the trees, and she sings to the stars. Tonight, the court is falling out of space behind their Queen, and they make arcs of green light against the night sky. When the lights have faded, the woman takes a peach from the basket beside her. She offers it briefly to the sky, cupped in her hands, then bites into it with satisfaction. 

"Do you offer it to me?" The Queen is drawn into solidity by the swell of juice across the woman's tongue and the way she wipes the back of her hand across her mouth. 

She is not so tall, this woman, but her eyes have the hundred colours of many races. Her name, carried from the blue-green world far away, is Naomi. She smiles at the sight of the Queen, and holds out the peach. "Always." 

The flesh is soft and sweet, tinged scarlet in the centre. The Queen eats with neat, small bites, until all that is left is the stone. Naomi watches, still cross-legged on the platform which sways gently in the ocean breeze. 

"There is steel in you, that you can know me and call me to you," The Queen turns the peach stone over in her hand. It would be easy to shift it to gold or glass, some magic bauble to make a mortal's eyes grow wide. It feels wrong, though, to destroy the potential within the seed. 

"I have always known I was not alone," says Naomi. "I dreamed I was a knight, a mother, a soldier, a hunter. And you were there, always." 

It is possible, the Queen supposes. She has known this soul for so long, perhaps it has come to know her in return. "You spurned me, once." The hurt festers still, despite the aeons and the distance. 

"That took strength," says Naomi. "You burn bright enough to cast others into shadow. Perhaps I needed time to foster my own light." 

"And now?" asks the Queen. She does not understand why she is breathless, or why so much hangs on this one answer. 

Naomi smiles and cups a hand over her heart. "I keep my own light here. But I would share it with you." She holds out her hand. It is an invitation to step into her world, to live as she does. 

The Queen frowns, uncertain. She is the one who makes the approach, she is the one who keeps court. There is danger here, she realises, and panic swells inside her. Her court rises up, vigilant. 

"Don't listen to them," says Naomi. She is calm, though the court could tear her apart at a word. "They're shadows, jealous and grasping. You have made them love you. They'll not easily let you love another." 

The court ripples beside the Queen and she hears their warning in nervous rustles and the hiss of swords. The platform ripples with their movement, and a sharp breeze moves through the branches. 

The trees are groaning now as their trunks flex and sway. Peaches tumble to the ground; the air is sickly with the smell of split fruit. The court is poised to raze the planet, but there is no need. She banishes them with a gesture.

The air hangs still and sweet around them. In the end it was not such a difficult decision. 

Naomi stands, presses her lips to the Queen's eyes, kisses them closed. "Stay with me a lifetime. Just one life. Then, I will come to dance with you forever." 

Enough of follies and diversions, enough of the mannered dances and jousts. Somewhere in this universe, something wonderful is happening. The Queen is content to stay where she is.


End file.
